David Bock released new gem this week called Crondonkulous. It allows you to write crontab recipes in Ruby from within your Rails application, which will later be published to your server's crontab when you deploy.

The developers of xing created a plugin called FlagShihTzu. It's not a dog.. or even a multiplayer game for your Tamagotchi. FlagShihTzu stores any number of ActiveRecord boolean model attributes as a single database field, using each bit as unique keys. But, the interesting part is that the interface remains exactly the same to the rest of your application.

James Harton released Lockbox and acts_as_lockbox this week. Lockbox provides a simple interface for securing sensitive data by managing RSA public key cryptography for your application. It allows you to define which attributes are sensitive and provides an application-wide locking and unlocking ability.

The Rails Rumble team has selected their 22 finalists and it's up to you to choose a winner. You've got until midnight tonight to get your vote in. Once you've voted, let us know who you liked and why... we just may talk about your project in an upcoming episode.

Mauricio Linhares released a plugin for Rails, this week, which allows you to do master / slave replication. Unlike masochism, master_slace_adapter works in conjunction with the Rails connection pool and is implemented as a new database adapter. So, no monkey patching necessary.

If you like the "Code Monkey" song at the end of this podcast, you should know that it was created by Jonathan Coulton and released under Creative Commons in April of 2006. Download it, buy it, or drop him a donation.

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In this episode we talk about gems, gem hosting, learning regular expressions, and Yehuda's five favorite things in Rails 3. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and if you've got any news, let us know at ruby5@envylabs.com.

Today's episode covers a variety of topics from teaching Ruby as a first language to testing habits and A/B testing to bcrypt. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and if you've got any stories you'd like for us to cover, let us know at ruby5@envylabs.com.

Welcome to Ruby5, where we bring you five minutes of Ruby news twice a week. We highly encourage you to listen to the podcast on our website and share your thoughts and comments on any of the stories at ruby5.envylabs.com.